1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a touch panel apparatus, a touch panel system, and an operation method thereof, in particular to such touch panel apparatus, touch panel system and operation method which analyze the track of an object and code it for executing a corresponding gesture function.
2. Description of Related Art
Touch screen apparatuses are a kind of interactive apparatuses for users to directly and intuitively operate some application software on screen. There are various types of touch screen apparatuses such as capacitive, resistive, optical, and ultrasonic touch panels. The application is illustrated by means of optical touch panel as examples below, but the present invention is not limited to the optical touch panels.
FIG. 1 shows a prior art optical touch panel system 1 which is disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 4,782,328. As shown in FIG. 1, the optical touch panel system 1 comprises two sensors 11 for capturing the images of an object 13 on a touch control area 12. A processor 14 is coupled to the two sensors 11, and calculates the sensing paths 15 linking the object 13 with the two sensors 11 by analyzing the images outputted by the sensors 11. The processor 14 also calculates the coordinates of the position of the object 13 according to the sensing paths 15. This optical touch panel system 1 requires two sensors 11 and therefore its cost is high.
FIG. 2 shows another prior art optical touch panel system 2 disclosed by Taiwanese Patent Publication No. 201003477, counterpart U.S. Pat. No. 7,689,381 B2. The optical touch panel system 2 comprises a mirror 21, two light sources 22, an image sensor 23 and a processor 24. The mirror 21 and the two light sources 22 are located around a touch control area 28. The mirror 21 is used to reflect the object 25 to generate a mirror image 26 of the object 25. The image sensor 23 captures the image of the object 25 and the mirror image 26. The processor 24 analyzes the sensing paths 27 passing the image of the object 25 and the mirror image 26, and calculates the coordinates of the object 25 according to the two sensing paths 27. The optical touch panel system 2 only needs one image sensor 23, and thus the cost is reduced.
Both of the foregoing optical touch panel systems (1, 2) can recognize the track of the object (which may be a finger or a device) and executes a corresponding gesture function. However, the prior art systems sequentially outputs the coordinates of the images of the object 25 to be processed by an application program, and because the amount of output data is large, a large transmission bandwidth is required. Furthermore, the application program needs to analyze the data to interpret its content; the calculation is complicated and the response time for identifying a gesture and executing a corresponding command is delayed.
In view of above, the present invention overcomes the foregoing drawbacks by providing a touch panel apparatus, a touch panel system, and an operation method which analyze the track of an object and code it for executing a corresponding gesture function. The data in association with the track of the object (a device or a finger) can be simplified in the front end of the operation, and this reduces the complexity of calculation. Thus, the system is more responsive to the gesture.